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We like to let the geese free range around the fruit trees because they eat bugs and graze on weeds, but our gander, Uncle Waldo, just loves to eat the bark off our orchard saplings. Since this kills the trees, we put some chicken wire around the saplings. This turned out to be a mistake which we have since rectified; however, we didn’t fix it before Uncle Waldo stuffed his big bill through the chickenwire in an attempt to get at that tempting bark, freaked out when he got stuck, and yanked his head up and back:

Geese’s bills are actually rather soft and the chickenwire sliced right to the bone:

Off to Dexter Animal Clinic we went, with Uncle Waldo in a dog crate honking dejectedly for his mate, Abigail, who was running about the yard in a tizzy, calling for Waldo, while the quacking ducks ran along behind her.

Protip: a wire dog crate is NOT the ideal way to transport a goose, as they spray poo out of their vent like a fire hose when they are scared. Luckily we had put a plastic tarp around him.

We weren’t sure if the vets would be familiar with treating geese, but Dr. Anna, a charming young British veterinarian, put us at ease right away with the knowledgeable way she handled Uncle Waldo. This clearly wasn’t her first goose rodeo.

She had Phil hold him in a towel to prevent poo spraying:

And then proceeded to clean his bill thoroughly with a cotton ball and iodine, soothing our worried nerves by distracting us with commentary about the kind of “gayce” they have in England:

She used a cotton swab to clean inside the sliced portion of his beak while chatting with him softly in her charming English accent, “Alright then, old man, here we go…”

She showed us that the slice had gone down to the bone but wasn’t as bad as other damaged bills she’s seen. She trimmed away the dead tissue with a little scalpel and then used surgical glue to fix him up:

Uncle Waldo is about nine weeks old and weights 9.1 pounds:

An injection of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and pain reliever was next; good old Uncle Waldo was such a trooper!

Dr. Anna said the bill will not regrow but that granulation tissue will form and fill in pretty well around the injury. Until then, Uncle Waldo must remain quarantined in the duck yard, which means the whole flock must remain there as they won’t willingly leave Uncle Waldo.

We had hoped to enter Uncle Waldo and Abigail in the Chelsea Community Fair; we thought they were a shoo-in for a ribbon given how rare Pilgrim geese are (the Livestock Conservancy lists them as critically endangered). Alas, his days as a show goose are over before they began:

However, he’ll still make excellent breeding stock. We plan to breed and sell Pilgrim geese so as to do our part in saving the breed from extinction.

Uncle Waldo has a ten-day course of oral antibiotics now. Dr. Anna explained to us how to crush the pill, dissolve it in warm water, and inject the antibiotic solution down his throat with a syringe; a goose’s windpipe is right at the back of their tongue in the center, so to give an oral medication, you must open their bill and insert the syringe down the side of their mouth a few inches into the esophagus. I haven’t been able to get any pictures of us doing this yet, but I will try to and will add them when I can.

After we got home and Uncle Waldo had reunited with the frantic Abigail and resumed his place as Head of the Flock, I treated everyone to a big bowl of blueberries and cantaloupe, which I dumped into their little swimming pool for them to enjoy rooting out:

It was a harrowing day but all in all Uncle Waldo is one lucky gander!

I don’t know why, but environmentalists always seem to want to import plants and insects from Asia to solve some problem here “naturally.” Now, I’m all about doing things naturally and avoiding chemicals, but have you ever noticed that the plants and insects that are imported from Asia always end up wreaking havoc? From the aggressive, biting Asian Lady Beetle (imported by environmentalists to kill aphids without the use of chemicals) that ended up killing all our own cute, non-aggressive lady bugs, to the Tree of Heaven that sprouts like foul-smelling weeds in every untended suburban or urban area, to the vile Autumn Olive planted by the Forest Service to control erosion – these plants and insects are adapted to the ecosystems in Asia, not North America.

Here they destroy everything in their path, reducing diversity to nil. Perhaps environmentalists do not care about eco-diversity, but one of the tenets of permaculture is supposed to be about encouraging ecological diversity!

Anyway, this is why I am a gardener and small-hold homesteader who uses permaculture practices but am not actually a permaculturist. When your attachment to dogma overrides good common sense, you might want to stop and reevaluate your goals and the reasons you are putting your hands to the soil in the first place.

I believe the people who are encouraging young, naive gardeners to just give Autumn Olive a try once, what can it hurt to try it once, go on, kid, all the cool permies plant it…fall into two camps.

the ones who may or may not have planted it but don’t yet realize how evil the plant is. These are analogous to freshman girls on campus who are just learning about feminism but haven’t yet experienced all the glorious empowerment of following in Lena Dunham’s slutty footsteps and

the ones who’ve already planted it and secretly know how evil the plant is. These folks are analagous to sex-positive feminists who have already contracted an STD like herpes and want every other girl to catch one too so they don’t feel so bad about their awful, life-long, incurable, diseased state.

But it has berries on it in the late summer/early fall, nice red berries that actually don’t taste very good. You decide to let the birds and wild creatures have the berries. They eat them with gusto and poop out the seeds all over your land.

Next summer you notice it’s getting difficult to walk through your forested areas because of all the thorny Autumn Olive shoots popping up EVERYWHERE.

A pasture you’d let lie fallow has shoots coming up too.

Well, you think, I’ll use them as chop-and-drop for soil improvement.

Hmmm, that’s an awful lot of chop-n-drop…

You try to chop and drop, but it’s hard to get near the shrubs now that they’ve quickly grown to ten feet tall, with multiple, thorny branches tangled together and arching over, making it difficult to get at the thick shoots, which by now can only be cut with a saw.

You get stabbed in the arm with one of the thorns…

…which is when you learn that many people have a strong reaction to Autumn Olive scratches. The scratch swells and is hot like fire for several weeks after that.

You run the branches through your mulcher and spread the wood chips around some new saplings you planted to take the place of the Autumn Olive. All the saplings die. That is when you learn a new word: allelopathic.

Oh man, I’m done with this stuff, you think. I’m cutting it all down come spring and burning it. And you feel satisfied with this eradication plan.

You manage to get it mostly all cut down, but it sends up suckers faster and faster the more you cut on it. Horrified, you sneak to Lowe’s wearing big sunglasses and a hat to conceal your identity before engaging in this most shameful act…you are going to buy some…some…oh you hate to confess it but you are going to buy some Round Up to spray all over the Autumn Olives. You cannot believe you have been reduced to spraying chemicals all over your organic land. You feel great shame but also great relief.

You spray and spray and it all dies.

Victory?

Ha.

Ha ha ha!

When the next spring comes, you cannot believe your eyes. From the dead Autumn Olives are springing…new shoots! This plant…it is literally an unkillable zombie eating everything in its path!

And at that moment the realization suddenly dawns on you…just like the herpes your hairy-legged, sex-positive feminist college roommate has for life, just like the zombies from an apocalypse…

Over my years as an employee at various places, I have on occasion heard one colleague or another (male AND female) make the odd inappropriate comment or off-color joke. I even had (a long time ago) a supervisor make a very clumsy attempt at flirting which included a wildly inappropriate sexual innuendo, which I laughed off. Because humans are sexual creatures, once in a while that subject is going to come up, perhaps as a joke, in the work place. Of course, it’s better if you don’t joke about sex at work, but it happens and as long as it’s not too egregious or a regular habit, I think we can probably all just let it slide, don’t you?

We’ve been slowly trying to build up a cash savings sufficient to cover six months’ worth of expenses. Just the other day, I was remarking to Philip that we were doing so well, almost there. Just when you’ve gotten prepared for a rainy day, doesn’t it seem like the rain always comes?

“I’ve noticed that the children’s book world is full of sentimental/boring works that only adults would be interested in. Every time I go to the library, it seems like I come home with at least one book that looked good, but turns out to be about a kid who’s pet died or a bird whose best friend turned out to be a snowball and then melted. Or about how the author grew up in poverty but it’s okay because they liked eating paint. (I am not making that up.)

Kids like books about cheeky toy trains, hoppy bunnies, funny superheroes, or grand adventures. They like rainbows and unicorns and swashbuckling pirates. They do not want to hear about how if you eat too much candy, you might have to go to the dentist and get a tooth pulled, for goodness’s sakes.”

If you don’t think that there is any particular agenda behind this, listen to the following children’s story.

Moral of the story: It’s fun being married to a cross-dresser!

But it isn’t (just) the liberal/SJW agenda that I’m objecting to. If the story is well-crafted, I could talk through with my kids why I don’t agree with whatever political or “social justice” point the author was trying to make. Kids’ books have always been a bit preachy in their own way, it’s just that back in the day the preachiness was aimed at getting kids to behave and be good and now it’s aimed at getting them to tear down Western civilization faster, faster, faster. But the craft aspect to it is TERRIBLE now. Thornton W. Burgess was a preachy conservationist, but my children loved hearing his stories about Reddy Fox and Lightfoot the Deer (you can listen to his stories being read by non-professional readers here). He was a fine children’s literature writer despite his tendency to anthropomorphize deer and his inability to comprehend that slow death by starvation due to overpopulation is not kinder than a quick death by a hunter’s gun.

Several years ago on another blog I wrote a post entitled What is happening to children’s literature? I think we understand now exactly what is happening to it, but I am going to repost that essay here since it seems relevant.

If you have children, you probably already know that March is National Reading Month.

Because we don’t watch television, our family listens to a lot of audio books. We try to choose ones that we all enjoy listening to and which will appeal to a range of ages. A typical evening in our house finds us gathered in the living room, the children drawing or writing and me working on a blog post, while listening to stories on the CD player. Because of this, I have listened to quite a number of both classic and modern children’s stories, and I have concluded that the modern ones are largely unimpressive.

Surely I am not the only parent who has noticed the startling decline in the quality of children’s literature? I first began thinking about this about ten years ago, when my husband and I noticed that many of the picture story books that had the Caldecott Medal Winner sticker on them were so…weird. The books were uninteresting to children and sometimes even frightened them, but I’m sure they were intriguing to the highly-educated, liberal parents of our generation who were raised to see things that are “alternative” as superior. This is the basic ethos of progressivism; anything new and strange, no matter how objectively crappy, is better than what came before. Weird, disturbing children’s books must be better than the simple, charming types of stories that came before, right?

We have continued to notice this trend as our children have gotten older. One year awhile back, we joined a mother-daughter book club at the library. One of the first books that was assigned to us was called The Higher Power of Lucky. We were given a free copy of the book to read, and let me tell you, it was dreadful. It was equal parts morbid and boring. The ten-year-old main character is a girl named Lucky whose mother died from being electrocuted during a storm; her father is unaccounted for and she lives with her father’s first ex-wife in an old trailer in a depressing desert town. She is obsessed with Charles Darwin for some reason and the primary adventure in the story seems to center around Lucky eavesdropping outside AA meetings and worrying that her guardian will abandon her.

Librarians are obsessed with this book. It is everywhere; it is one of their most highly recommended books. Just now we have returned from the library and there were five copies of the audio book on the shelf. Five copies! Audio books are expensive, and it always takes them ages to order the classic ones that I request, but somehow we have money for five copies of this book. No one ever checks them out, but I’m sure it makes the librarians feel very cheerful and progressive to see them on the shelf.

There were several other books that we read for that book club, all equally strange and uninspiring. Modern children’s books usually have main characters who are female, have an intense grrrll power message, and often involve scenes in which girls behave unethically to get what they want. I allowed our girls to listen to a modern story called The Callahan Cousins on audio book last summer about three cousins (all girls) who stay with their grandmother for the summer. The girls – all grrrl-powered up of course – lie, steal, gossip, sneak out, sneak around, and none of this is portrayed in the story as a negative thing.

I can’t imagine what kind of literature is out there for boys now. I rarely see much of anything geared at boys on the shelves, other than stories based on movies, video games, and TV shows. Classic literature isn’t used much anymore, but the new literature is mostly badly written, dull, upsetting, and uninteresting, mostly progressivist propaganda. Virtually every book for girls in the age range of 7 to 12 seems to include some kind of self-conscious gender-bending or gender “stereotype” smashing theme.

I know that many of my readers are parents and would probably like to know of good books for children between the ages of 7 and 15. I will start by recommending the following five books, none of which are Christian books.

All of these stories are available on audio book at our library, but even if you can’t get the audio version, I think your children would enjoy reading these stories:

These are perfect for young boys as well as girls. You can buy the books, but I very strongly recommended springing for the extra few dollars to buy the audio books. The author reads them himself and includes songs, and his delivery is just so entertaining. I recommend Hank the Cowdog very highly. We have almost the entire series on audio book now (we’ve been purchasing them slowly over the past decade); also, check your library’s children’s audio book collection because they very well may have some of these or may be willing to purchase them.

Here is a YouTube clip of the author, John Erickson, giving a reading (he’s a much in-demand speaker and lecturer and is a salt-of-the earth Texan Christian sort.)

On Friday, April 1, Ann Arbor Open students, chalk in hand, spread messages of love, peace and unity—and pizza—on the sidewalks outside of their school, 920 Miller Ave.

The words and peace signs are in response to a chalking on the University of Michigan Diag Wednesday, March 30. Someone had written #StopIslam and Trump 2016, causing a response from university officials and backlash on social media.

“This is an opportunity to spread love and peace, even with small actions like this,” said Open Principal Meg Fenech. “We can combat hate. Even a kindergartner speaking your thoughts of unity and togetherness, that’s important.”

I am a big proponent of literature-based language intervention for children with language-learning disabilities. I’ll often choose a text and have kids study it for several weeks, using the text for semantic development, syntax practice, and narrative retelling.